Cloud Strategy – An Overview

For Lot of organization moving to cloud is in the top of their agenda. But moving to cloud is not a destination and it is only a starting point of the journey.

And in the days when we hear very frequent news related to cloud services downtime like dropbox downtime, netfilx downtime, organisations need to be more cautious when deciding to use public cloud.

The primary thing organization should understand that cloud computing is just the normal services like electricity, Internet connection which we use everyday. It has the possibility to get down due to many reason. Even a malfunction in the cloud gateway can result in your service disruption.

Just like the way more business leaders predict, cloud is not always the cheaper option for running applications . Once we moved the application to cloud we don’t require internal IT Team, because everything runs in cloud.

Contrary to this popular prediction, in some cases running applications in cloud makes a costly affair for the organisation. But virtualy endless computing power, efficiency must be the prime reason for selecting the cloud.

Also on moving to cloud , the organisations can never get rid of the IT Staff. Instead they require IT Staff with entirely different skill sets suitable to the new environment. Also they require more extensive planning for securing, and ensuring the availability of the data.

Organistaions need to work on the following strategy before they decide to shift their applications to public cloud.

Whether their business and their country law permits them to move their application and data to cloud.

which platform and service provider will be suitable for their business

Non Disclosure Agreement ( NDA ) and Service Level Agreement ( SLA ) as per the business need

How to create walled garden for their data in the open public cloud

Planning for the redundancy required as per the business need

Disaster Recovery Planning ( DRP )

Data portability between different service providers

Last but not the least, exit plan if the service provided by service provider is not up to the benchmark.

A clear study is required on the above items. Business leaders should be convinced about the benefits and risk on moving to public cloud.